Albatross Soup Novels & Stories

In order to stay by Samuel Hudson's side, I decide to give up on the one-billion-dollar reward offered by the system. At the same time, I've used up all of the luck I've accumulated just to trade for a chance to fully heal Samuel's legs. But the price I need to pay is that I have to bind my life force to Samuel's devotion toward me. If he cheats on me physically or emotionally, my soul will be extracted from my body forcibly, leading to my eventual destruction. The moment I go through with the binding process, I find myself hesitating for a moment. But the sight of Samuel kneeling on one knee while proposing to me lovingly makes me believe him. I believe him with my whole heart when he promises to stay devoted to me forever. Because of this, I'm content with being the woman who will endure everything for her lover's sake. So, I tap the "confirm" button firmly. For the next seven years, Samuel and I continue to love each other as passionately as ever. Together, we've overcome countless challenges and survived many low tides together. But on our wedding anniversary, while I'm making soup for Samuel in the kitchen, I begin coughing violently all of a sudden. Soon, I spit out a huge glob of dark blood. Then, I look down to see my body starting to become transparent. In fact, my fingers can no longer touch the glass on the counter. At the same time, alarm bells begin ringing in my mind. [Warning! Samuel's affection level has dropped below the critical threshold. Destruction protocol is now activated.]

After 18 infamous gang leaders of Wicked Valley stumble upon me, they adopt me and work hard in raising me. Since my dads refuse to let me get in contact with all males while showing their violent sides to everyone else all day, I run away from home out of anger. I've left home for three years so far. Throughout the years, I've gotten into a passionate relationship. But on the night my boyfriend, Vincent Gray, proposes to me, he has the nerve to lace my red wine with drugs. Then, he ties me up and delivers me back to Wicked Valley. "The 18 bosses of Wicked Valley have posted a lucrative bounty on a young woman with a phoenix tattoo on her arm. It so happens that you have it. "My younger sister, Wendy Gray, has offended someone out there. Only by giving you to those bosses can Wendy's life be spared!" Then, Vincent adds sorrowfully, "Don't worry, Noelle. I'll definitely include you in my family tree once you're dead. I'll make sure that you won't die without a family." As I stare at Vincent's phony expression, deep down, I'm elated. It's been three years. Finally, someone is taking me home. While faced with Vincent's shocked look, I smile while snapping my fingers at the group of people, who are about to pick me up. "What are you waiting for, everyone? Prepare some seasonings! We're eating good tonight! Let's have lamb soup!"

For a full decade, my billionaire husband and my best friend were locked in a vicious feud. Jordan Skinner had deliberately run Giselle Parson over with his car, shattering her leg. In retaliation, Giselle had smashed a baseball bat into his head, leaving him deaf in one ear. I rushed around to care for them and bitterly pleaded with them to stop fighting. Ironuton's high society laughed about it behind our backs—the all-powerful CEO and the proud heiress tearing the city apart, with pathetic little me trapped helplessly in the middle. After yet another heated argument, they abandoned me on a remote mountain during a camping trip. A passing drifter found me and brutally assaulted me. When they finally located me, Jordan flew into a rage and broke the man's legs, while Giselle crushed his groin. They held me tightly and wept, swearing a truce on the spot. From then on, they joined forces to spoil me, turning me into the happiest woman in Ironuton. On our third anniversary, I prepared chicken soup and carried it to Jordan's office. Through the narrow crack, I saw Giselle straddling him, moving with raw desire. "These past few years... I only ever feel anything when it's with you, Jordan," she said, her voice dripping with lust. "That night, when Jane was being tortured by that drifter on the mountain, we were down in the valley cabin using this same position, weren't we?" Jordan smacked her backside, warning, "Shut up, Giselle. We owe her. If you let her find out the truth, I'll show you no mercy." The thermos slipped from my fingers and crashed to the floor. Jordan froze mid-motion and looked up to see me standing there.

My father raised me on one principle: fair exchange. If I wanted anything, I had to earn it myself. Fifty cents for washing the dishes. A dollar for mopping the floor. Five dollars for a perfect score on a test. To buy the pair of white sneakers I had been dreaming of, I spent three months collecting recyclables. In that house, I lived like a pieceworker, paid by the task. It was not until my senior year of high school that everything began to crack. I collapsed during morning study, my body worn down by years of malnutrition. The doctor said I needed better nutrition. My father stood by my hospital bed and started doing the math. "Three hundred for the hospital stay. Two hundred for medication. Chester, this all goes on your tab for the future." I turned my head and saw a boy in a school uniform in the next bed. His father was feeding him spoonfuls of chicken soup, his eyes red with worry. In that moment, the world I had known for 18 years fell apart. It turned out not every child had to earn their parents' love. After I was discharged, I went home and saw the pair of designer sneakers on my brother's feet; it was worth thousands. That was when I finally woke up. I tore up the family photo and, without hesitation, applied to the college farthest from home. Ten years later, my father called me in tears. My brother had taken all his retirement savings, sold the house, and run off with his girlfriend. He was left with nothing. No home. No one. I smiled and tossed him a rag. "Want a place to stay? Sure. It's 50 cents per window. Earn your own rent."

Maya Reyes is twenty-six, quietly resilient, and out of options. When she takes a live-in nanny position for a Manhattan billionaire, she expects a difficult employer and a lonely child. She gets both, but she also gets Ethan Cole. Ethan lost his wife eighteen months ago and has been managing the grief the only way he knows how: by controlling everything around him. His apartment is spotless, his rules are laminated, his daughter Lily is the only crack in the armour he has built around his life, and it is through Lily that Maya begins to see the man underneath. What follows is not a dramatic love story, it is a quiet one. He carries her to her room when she falls asleep on the floor, he heats her soup when she hasn't eaten. He holds her hand in a dark car and lets go like it never happened. She cooks for him, confronts him, tells him truths no one else will, and slowly without either of them naming it, they become the most important person in each other's lives. But grief doesn't move in straight lines. When Ethan's fear gets the better of him, he tries to restore the distance, and nearly loses the one thing that has made him want to come back to life. It will take a four-year-old's unfiltered honesty, a letter Maya writes from the floor of her room, and a man finally choosing to stop running, for both of them to find their way to the other side of it. When Winter Blooms is a story about what love looks like before anyone admits it exists, and what it costs to let it.

When the Jensens reunite with their long-lost biological daughter, Lyra Jensen, they kick out my girlfriend, Lorraine Jensen, the daughter they'd mistakenly raised in her place. Not wanting to see Lorraine fall into destitution, I go crazy spending all my money on luxury goods for her so that she can still hold her head up high in public. For Lorraine's sake, I openly refuse to marry Lyra. Moved to tears, Lorraine swears she'll love me forever. Yet, when she eventually becomes the top female CEO in Jannington, the first thing she does is bring my family to ruin and destroy my life. She drives my father to jump off a building and gives my mother a heart attack. I beg her to save my mother, but she locks me in a cage and lets her assistant, Evan Scott, torture me as he pleases. When I confront her, she sneers and says to me, "I've had enough of you acting all high and mighty in front of me, Cyrus. Your so-called attempt to support me was just you using your money to humiliate me! "To me, your money is worth less than a bowl of soup Evan makes for me." Even until my last breath, resentment is all I can feel. … My eyes open once more. I've been reborn back in time, during my first attempt to back Lorraine up in public. She throws aside the sapphire necklace I gave her and declares with a cold, haughty gaze, "I don't need your pity, Cyrus. Don't even try to act all superior to my face."

She dragged a bleeding stranger off the streets of East London when she was twelve years old. She cleaned his wounds, fed him cheap soup, and told him to stop acting like royalty before she threw him back outside. By morning, he was gone without a trace. She forgot about him. He never forgot about her. Eirlys Whitmore grew up learning how to survive on scholarship money, secondhand coats, and stubbornness alone. Brilliant and emotionally guarded, she has spent her entire life keeping people at a careful distance. When she earns early acceptance into the prestigious Blackthorn Dominion University at sixteen, she believes it is purely the result of her own hard work. She has no idea the Crown Alpha of the Virellion Dominion pulled every string to put her there. Kaevrix Noctharis Virellion is not supposed to exist in her world. He is ancient, powerful, and feared across an entire supernatural dominion that hides itself beneath human society. He rejected five fated mates, abandoned royal duties, and spent years quietly watching over a human girl from London shadows she never noticed. To everyone else, he is untouchable. But something about her sharp mouth and complete indifference to danger broke through every wall he was raised to build. When he enrolls beside her under a false identity as a calm, glasses-wearing student named Kae, she has no reason to suspect anything. He is simply the quiet, slightly unnerving boy who always sits too close. She has no idea he has already decided she belongs to him. And he has no idea she is the one person alive who will refuse to let him get away with it.

At midnight, Marvin Cooper throws a confession form at my face. The sharp edge of the paper cuts the corner of my eye, and bright red blood begins to seep out. He barks, "Alyssa hit someone with her car. You have a similar build to her. Go to the police station and take the blame." His tone leaves no room for argument, as if he is casually asking me to make him a late-night snack. His first love, Alyssa Evans, hides behind him and tugs pitifully at his sleeve. "But Marvin, if Ms. Huston goes to jail, who's going to make the nourishing soup for you?" Marvin lets out a disdainful snort and looks at me with contempt. "She's just a piece of trash from an orphanage. She should be honored to take the blame for you. Without me, she wouldn't even be able to feed herself. Other than obeying me, what choice does she have?" I wipe the blood from the corner of my eye and look at the man for whom I have spent three years as an unpaid housekeeper and a living blood bank. To treat his stomach condition, I burn my hands countless times cooking for him. I become so anemic that I easily collapse because I've been donating my blood to Alyssa. Marvin is certain that I love him with all my heart, and that I can only cling to him for the rest of my life. I don't cry. I simply take off the cheap apron I'm wearing and say, "You don't need to throw me out. I'll leave on my own." Taking out my phone, I dial a number I have blocked for three years. "I've had my fun. Send a helicopter to pick me up tomorrow. It's time for me to go home and take over the family business."

"Jump. You love me to death, don't you? Didn't you say you'd do anything for me?" Ethan Hart wanted me to throw myself off the observation deck of the tallest tower downtown, live, in front of the millions of people watching the broadcast. I stood on the wrong side of the railing. Below me, traffic streamed through the streets and neon flickered in the distance. His friends clapped and cheered. Vivian Lane laughed softly and curled herself against his arm. Ethan's grin turned vicious. "Come on, don't waste everyone's time. Jump, and I'll marry you." He'd made me a promise once. Finish a hundred of his demands, and he would marry me. When his company was circling bankruptcy, he told me to hand over everything I owned, and I did. Then he moved Vivian into my house in the suburbs and left me to sleep in a motel. The night he was tangled up with Vivian at a private party, he sent me over with something for his hangover, and made a point of telling me to bring a box of condoms, the right size. I stood at the door holding the soup I'd made, and heard him laugh. "She's my ATM. I use her, then I throw her out." No matter how far it went, I'd done all ninety-nine. This was the last one: jump. He thought I'd hesitate, thought I'd cry and beg him to pick something else. I didn't. I let go and fell. The wind roared in my ears, and the whole lit-up city slid past me. I heard him shout, heard the crowd scream, and underneath all of it, the one voice I'd waited too long to hear. [Congratulations, host. Emotional conquest progress: one hundred percent. Reward delivered. Your mother's terminal illness is fully cured.]

Ethan and I met at a soup kitchen in the slums. We were fighting over half a moldy bread roll. I only learned his story from other people later. His father was the head of Lorencio's largest crime family, killed in a bloody power struggle from within. His mother took a payout and vanished. My father was an accountant for another family. He was framed for cooking the books and shot dead. Same story, same wound. That was what brought us together. We clawed our way up from a crumbling slum to the marble halls of the Lorencio crime families, until finally Ethan took his seat as Don of the Valeria Family. Nine years of marriage. No church. No proposal. Not even a proper cake. Then one day, out of nowhere, Ethan said he wanted to get me a diamond ring. "We had no church and no priest when we got married. I've been meaning to do this properly for a long time. And there'll be more to come." I stared at the custom diamond in the display case, enormous and flawless, and felt something close to happiness. The sales associate smiled and complimented his taste, mentioning that another couple had just ordered a ring too. They'd walked out minutes ago, planning a proposal for tomorrow. "Nine years together and still this in love. That's everything." I reached for his hand. He stepped away, said he needed to take a call. I hadn't heard his phone ring. I followed. Down the hallway, I watched him press a woman against the wall, his mouth on hers. His voice was sharp with jealousy. "You actually agreed to let him propose to you?" "Break it off. I'll buy you the ring." I stood frozen. My chest caved in. Then a pair of hands pulled me into a fitting room alcove. A man's breath was close, warm in the dark. A low voice, almost amused: "Your husband's sleeping with my fiancée. Why don't we give it a try too?"